This is the final part of a 3-part guest post by long-time commenter Richard S. Russell. Read part 1 here.
This analysis of decision making brings me to my take-home point: faith sucks.
Faith is the world’s worst possible decision-making method.
Nobody ever uses faith to decide anything that really matters. You wouldn’t rely on faith to pick out a used car or your kid’s college or even what brand of soap to use.
For sure nobody—no, not the most ardent fundamentalist—would slap on a blindfold, put sealing wax in his ears, and rely on faith to decide when it’s safe to cross a busy highway.
No, the only time faith ever gets trotted out as a justification for anything is when there’s absolutely no other justification whatsoever. Nobody ever uses faith when there’s a better decision-making method available.
Not surprisingly, then, faith is the primary thing cited by preachers for why you should mortgage your brain to buy the huge crock of, let us say, fertilizer that they’re peddling. What else can they point to? Reason? Evidence? Common sense? Hardly.
Centuries ago, Christian leaders must have realized that they had an uphill struggle to get people to believe the enormous whoppers they were trying to sell. So they decided to back the process up a step and, instead of touting the conclusions they were pushing, speak glowingly of the process by which they arrived at those conclusions. That is, nobody in her or his right mind was likely to believe, from a standing start, that anyone would be able to change water into wine. But, soften them up ahead of time by conning them into thinking that faith is a wonderful thing, then the whole water-into-wine thing becomes an exercise in faith, “… and didn’t you already say you were one of the faithful?”
To give credit where it’s due, Christian charlatans—with aid from the rack, the thumbscrew, and the stake—have been hugely successful in their efforts to create a wholly undeserved good reputation for faith. Lutherans name their churches after it. Musicians write hymns of praise to it. Proud parents name their baby girls after it. It’s entered the popular lexicon in phrases like “Keep the faith, baby!” and “Ya gotta have faith.” (though nobody ever explains exactly why).
Perhaps the most widely quoted such phrase is “Faith can move mountains.” This cliché is always intoned with great solemnity, and everyone in the vicinity is expected, as a matter of social convention, to nod knowingly, as if some great and profound truth has just been uttered. It’s considered unutterably rude to do what I always do, namely ask “Oh yeah? Name one example!” Having hard reality intrude into the socially approved delusional circle jerk of mountain-moving faith is something that is Not Done In Polite Society.
Oh, please. Get over it. Look, let’s put it this way. If you and I were to sit down on opposite sides of a table, and I were to point out a speck of dust on that table, and you mustered all the faith at your disposal—maybe even called in old markers of faith that you’d lent out to your friends—do you think you could get that grain of dust to so much as twitch? Of course not. You know better. Faith can’t do squat. If it can’t move a speck of dust, whence cometh this grandiose claim about mountains?
Well, here’s my unresearched take on it. I think it’s a classic example of what stage magicians call “misdirection” and what street hustlers call “the old switcheroo.” It’s akin to advertising puffery, which no thinking person takes seriously. “Cleaner than clean”? Say what? But mindless ideas like that are evidently effective on the unthinking, which is why they continue to get used.
Same deal with references to faith. Preachers bundle it together with truly admirable virtues, such as hope and charity, expecting their favorite scam to benefit from good associations. And, as George Orwell warned in his essay on NewSpeak at the end of 1984, they also use “faith” where the proper term is “trust” or “confidence,” trying to trick the gullible into thinking of them as synonyms.
But war is not peace. Slavery is not freedom. Ignorance is not strength. Faith is not trust, nor confidence, nor even hope. Faith is the decision-making technique of last resort, the bottom of the barrel when it comes to reliability, the “F” on the report card of worldly wisdom.
As I said, nobody ever uses faith for anything that actually matters—and certainly not for anything that can be tested, let alone measured. It’s the pernicious basis of not only religion, with all its attendant evils, but also homeopathy, astrology, objectivism, ufology, conspiracy theories, climate-change denial, false accusations of ritual satanic child abuse, anti-vax movements, a host of superstitions, personality cults, jingoism, imperialism, racism, quackery, Chinese traditional “medicine,” feng shui, and the insidious brain parasite that leads people to endlessly obsess over anyone named Kardashian.
Frankly, you have to be an idiot to take anything on faith.
As it happens, billions qualify.
See also: “Faith, the Other F-Word”

Christians are obsessed with the lifelong goal
of earning permission to move back
into their heavenly father’s house and live on his dime,
yet we’re the ones who need to grow up.
— commenter TheBookOfDavid

Image credit: U.S. Army Photography Contest, flickr, CC

This is part 2 of a 3-part guest post by long-time commenter Richard S. Russell. Read part 1 here.
All these inputs—definitions, axioms, assumptions, genetics, sensations, memories, and testimony—get fed into the hopper at one end of our factory. Then they pass through one of eight gates to undergo some kind of process that produces decisions at the other end. This brings us to the meat of the matter, the processes in the middle. There are eight of them. I’ll discuss them in order from most to least reliable.
Processes
1. Logic. Formal logic dates back to ancient Greece and is based on the concept of the syllogism. A syllogism has two explicitly stated premises (or “if” statements) which are combined using rules of logic to produce a conclusion (a “then” statement).
Example #1: If all men are fallible, and if Aristotle is a man, then Aristotle is fallible.
Logic tells us absolutely nothing about the truth of the two premises. For example, consider:
Example #2: If all squares are round, and if this triangle is a square, then this triangle is round.
Example #2 follows exactly the same structure as Example #1 and thus leads to a conclusion which is equally valid (that is, reliable according to the rules of logic). The conclusion is, of course, ludicrous, but that’s because the premises are ludicrous. However, logic will yield true conclusions from true premises. It does not and cannot, however, make any a priori statements about whether premises are true.
But, as processes go (and it’s processes we’re considering here—assumptions were covered when we looked at inputs), logic is absolutely cracker-jack—the most robust and reliable process of them all.
2. Reason. This is the standard used in law: “Under the circumstances, what would a reasonable person do?” It’s similar to logic but is heavily larded with considerations of the practical. You take a “reasonable” amount of time to gather evidence from “reasonable” sources, then use logic or a “reasonable” facsimile thereof to arrive at “reasonable” conclusions. You don’t spend an undue amount of effort on minutiae, because in real life there are always other demands on your time. A crucial element in reason is the acceptance of your own fallibility. You should admit to the possibility of error and keep an open mind toward new evidence. Having an open mind, however, does not mean you need a hole in your head. If something clearly makes no sense, you should say so and waste no more time on it.
3. Confidence. You are confident of something on the basis of its track record or the history of similar situations, without taking the time to examine the particulars of the current situation. “My car started last winter when it was 15° below zero, and I’m confident it will do so again this year.” We overtly recognize that there are degrees of confidence: “My car started easily enough last winter when it was 15° below zero, so I’m pretty sure it will do so now that it’s 30° below.”
4. Trust. This is similar to confidence, except that the way the language has evolved, we usually express confidence in things and trust in people. Additionally, because we’re social creatures and want to like other people and have them like us, we sometimes trust people who don’t necessarily have a track record of good decisions. Little children usually give parents a free ride when it comes to trust, because they’re in no position to know any better. Adults tend to trust authority figures more than is warranted. And so on. Thus I rate it lower on the scale of reliability than confidence.
5. Chance. The roll of the dice, the flip of the coin, the turn of the card—seems like a hell of a way to make up your mind, doesn’t it? However, I advance the premise that, in real-world terms, it’s not so bad. You usually don’t resort to chance as a decision-making technique unless you’ve reduced your alternatives down to two or three options, no one of which is clearly better than any of the others. In short, your time might well be more efficiently spent making some sort of decision than in further dithering over exactly which 1 will give you that extra one percent of benefit. At least the concept of chance implies the choice between alternatives, which means you haven’t just blindly accepted the first idea that popped into your head. And, of course, chance has a real role to play in experimentation, where you want to be sure that the choices of, say, which patients get real drugs and which get placebos isn’t governed by hidden assumptions or prejudices.
6. Obedience. This is like a corrupted form of trust. The implication here is that you are doing what someone else tells you to, but for reasons of pressure, coercion, immaturity, feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem, threat, etc., rather than a free-will decision. If you choose not to obey, you may be opening yourself up to consequences worse than any bad decision which would result from obedience. In a perverse way, this means that obedience may actually produce decisions which are good from a holistic viewpoint, since giving up your lunch money (normally a bad decision) may mean that you won’t get the crap beaten out of you. Still, you may recall Lord Acton’s statement that “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Over the long haul, giving any other person this kind of power over you is likely to lead to decisions being made on your behalf which are progressively worse for you. If you can get away with it, question authority.
7. Hope. We now start getting pretty tenuous in terms of whether these processes are at the level of conscious thought. If I were to say “My car started last winter when it was 15° below zero, and I think it will do so now that it’s 60° below,” I’ve passed out of the realm of confidence and into the domain of wishful thinking, or, in a word, hope. Pop psychology has a different buzzword for it: “denial.” Another phrase is “magical thinking.” (Rationalist: When you hear hoofbeats, don’t think zebras, think horses. Fantasist: When you hear hoofbeats, don’t think horses, think unicorns.) These are used in decision-making when the evidence points toward a conclusion that we really don’t want, so we base our decisions—for no particularly good reason—on the hope that what we do want will come true.
8. Faith. Last and least we come to faith, the decision-making tool of last resort (and thus the one most favored by the priesthood). Faith is when you want to believe something but there’s not a shred of evidence for it and quite often lots of evidence against it. Whenever you have evidence to support a conclusion, you’d use one of the seven previous decision-making methods and would have no hesitation in saying so. Faith gets hauled out only to support conclusions for which there is no reason to believe in their truth, validity, efficacy, or efficiency.
Indeed, faith is listed among these other processes only in a kind of honorary fashion, because arguably there’s no “process” involved at all: the assumptions at the input end (like “God exists”) essentially go straight thru, unmodified, and come out the other end looking not a whole lot different than when they went in (kind of like creamed corn when you’ve got the flu).
That final process, faith, is examined in detail in the final part of this essay.

They say, “In the end, everything will make sense.”
They never seem to mention that it could start making way more sense now,
if you would just question some of your fundamental assumptions.
— CrustaceanSingles.com

Image credit: Derek Finch, flickr, CC

The Mariner IV spacecraft was built with four solar panels. The panels were folded during launch and were to spring out once the spacecraft was in space, but the fragile panels couldn’t be damaged by being abruptly snapped into place. Previous spacecraft had used dampers to control the panels’ motion, but these and other improved dampers were unsatisfactory because they contained oil that could leak or were too heavy or were unreliable. The damping problem became a great concern as the launch date came nearer. Only after investigating what would happen after a complete failure of the damper was it discovered that dampers were in fact unnecessary.
Mariner IV went to Mars in 1964 without solar panel dampers. The lightest and most reliable damper was no damper at all.

We constantly make decisions in everyday life, but how can we best approach them? Can we improve this familiar process? There are different ways of going about it, some excellent, some atrocious. And that’s what this essay is about.
This is a guest post by long-time commenter Richard S. Russell. Richard is a retired research analyst (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction); long-time activist in the realms of atheism, science fiction, and liberal politics; ballroom dancer; database developer; and generally highly opinionated person. He blogs irregularly at richardsrussell.blogspot.com.
Everybody makes hundreds of decisions every day. Some of those are good decisions, some bad, but the great majority are simply routine. You walk into the bathroom early in the morning and, without spending any noticeable time on it, decide to flip on the light switch, something you’ve done so often it’s habitual.
But somewhere along the line, perhaps on the very first morning you woke up in that house, you had to make that light-switch decision for the first time ever. At that point, you invested a little bit of thought in it. This essay is about decisions like that, the kind where you consciously work through the question before arriving at a conclusion.
It’s not about the sort of process that Malcolm Gladwell discussed in detail in his book Blink, wherein people arrive at judgments—often correct ones—in the blink of an eye but can’t articulate how or what led them to their conclusions. What Gladwell glosses over is that his chief examples are of experts in their fields—art critics looking at what purports to be an ancient Greek status but is actually a fake, or a tennis champion who went on to a long career as a coach and TV color commentator being able to predict with uncanny accuracy which of a player’s soft second serves would turn out to be double faults. These are people who have internalized their expertise into their subconscious minds. But I’ll be discussing normal de novo decisions by normal, non-expert people.
The Idea Factory
Let’s think of decision-making as being akin to an industrial plant—an idea factory, if you will—where inputs go thru a process to get turned into outputs. Because I’m mainly interested in the middle part, let’s quickly dispose of the two ends.

Outputs
The results of decision-making are things we do, say, think, and believe. Outputs also include several things which occur below (or perhaps outside of) the level of conscious thought: emotions, esthetics, and habits. These are, of course, a vital part of human existence, but they don’t involve conscious thought, so I’m going to skip them.
Inputs
There are several types of inputs into decisions, each with its own problems.
1. Definitions. Words are labels for concepts. We use words to make it easier to comprehend and manipulate the concepts. That makes it essential that we know which word goes with which concept, and that’s sometimes harder than it sounds. For example, consider the word “light.” It’s perhaps the most versatile word in the English language, with over a hundred meanings, in every possible part of speech. Just in the sciences, it can mean:

• the opposite of heavy (an adjective, used in mechanics),
• what a bird does on a limb (an intransitive verb, used in ornithology),
• a visible form of electromagnetic radiation (a noun, used in optics), or
• ignite, as with a Bunsen burner (a transitive verb, used in chemistry).

Often the meaning of the word will be clear from context, but it’s always a good idea, when getting into complex, knotty issues with people you might disagree with, to be sure you’ve agreed on a common set of definitions right from the outset.
2. Axioms. These are glorified assumptions. The glory comes from several different sources. Axioms are:

• universal—they apply everywhere, and everyone agrees on them
• reliable—no exceptions have ever been observed
• fundamental—they can’t be explained in terms of anything simpler

Perhaps the best known set of axioms are the five axioms of Giuseppe Peano, from which the entire theory of natural numbers can be derived. Euclid’s axioms and postulates also form the basis for a complete understanding of plane geometry.
However, outside of abstract fields like mathematics and symbolic logic, axioms are very difficult to come by.
3. Ordinary Assumptions. Into absolutely every decision goes at least one assumption (usually many more). Assumptions are notoriously unreliable. You may have heard the old joke about the word “assume,” which is derived from a process which makes an “ass” of “u” and “me.” Yet they are also unavoidable. For example, into every decision you personally make about what course of action you intend to pursue is the assumption that you will be alive to pursue it. In the discussion of processes which follows, we will see that formal logic tries diligently to state its assumptions explicitly, as premises. This is by far the exception; most assumptions are unstated or implicit.
4. Genetics. “You can do anything if you want it bad enough. That is why we see so many people who can fly.” (Elden Carnahan) But you have no wings, so you can’t fly. You have no gills, so you can’t breathe underwater. It’s also likely that your brain is wired in such a way that there are some thoughts that you simply are unable to think. These probably vary from one individual to another, and they’re almost impossible to measure. To some extent, the limitations of genetics can be overcome by diligent training, but some limits imposed on us by nature we can never overcome.
5. Sensations. Sensory input is extremely valuable but also fallible. As part of a demo I use in my database classes, I hold up three pieces of paper, stapled together with a plastic overlay, and ask the class what color each piece of paper is. The top piece appears to be yellow, the middle one looks orange, and the lowest one is green.
At least, that’s the way it looks until I flip up the piece of yellow plastic in front of them, and they’re revealed to be white, pink, and blue.

This is just one of many ways in which you might be misled by your senses. Of course, there’s a “but wait” part to the story as well, which is that it was also our senses which gave us the true picture behind the misleading façade. So rigorous attention to detail can produce a substantial improvement on our original casual sensory input. Can we ever be sure it’s perfectly accurate? No.
6. Memories. Your recollections of your own life experiences get hauled out when something trips the trigger of association in your brain that says “Hey, this new thing is like that old thing.” Memories, too, are sometimes unreliable but provide an unavoidable context for your decisions.
7. Testimony, also known as “other people’s memories.” Personal testimony is one of those curious things that has a great reputation which is completely unwarranted. Yet, despite its being colored by the testifier’s expectations and biases, it too serves as a form of input to the decision-making process—just one that we need to be cautious about.
In part 2, we consider the eight ways we process these inputs. Some are good, and some … aren’t.

I used to think I was indecisive,
but now I’m not so sure.
— seen on the internet

Bad decisions make good stories.
— seen on the internet

Image credit: Kosala Bandara, flickr, CC